The field of the invention is printers.
Printers are increasingly coming into widespread use, to print text, drawings, posters, and other graphic materials, including color printed materials. Moving carriage type printers are often used for printing large scale works. In these types of printers, a printhead is supported on a carriage which moves laterally back and forth across a recording medium, such as paper. Moving carriage type ink jet printers have flexible ink supply lines between the moving printhead and a fixed position ink reservoir. Rollers or other paper moving devices correspondingly move the paper longitudinally relative to the printhead. In this way, printing on any area of the paper can be accomplished.
Printing large scale works consumes large quantities of ink. To avoid degrading printing speed and quality, it is desirable to be able to replenish ink supplies without interrupting the printer, and, of course, without running out of ink before the work is complete.
Due to the need to frequently replenish ink supplies while printing large scale works, it is highly desirable that the ink replenishment operation can be performed quickly, reliably, and easily, and without leakage. For most typical home and office personal computer applications, loss of ink supply is only a minor inconvenience, since each work or document is usually short, and the printer is under the user's control. However, for larger scale works, including color works, loss of ink supply can result in significant losses of time, materials and labor.
To generate color works, combinations of different color inks are typically used, such as black, cyan, magenta and yellow inks, which, when appropriately combined, can make most desired colors. For proper operation, the different color inks must of course be supplied to the appropriate locations or parts of the print head. It is therefore desirable for the printer to have an ink delivery system which insures that correct color of ink is supplied to each port on the printhead.
Accordingly, there remains a need for an improved printer ink delivery system.